Hello. If you read Daily Kos during the week (and don’t just dart in on Sunday mornings for the compressed wisdom of Ross Douthat), you might have noticed a curious thing over the last two weeks. My name has been on the front page rather more often than over the previous decade+ in which I’ve stumbled around this place.
That’s because I work for you now. Well, Markos. And Dr. Barbin. But mostly for you guys. I’ve made the transition from volunteer to staff, and it feels pretty good. So… good morning!
It also figures that this morning I would fumble the publishing of APR. Sorry about that.
And now…
Leonard Pitts on what Flint is really about.
As you no doubt know, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, returned to the headlines last week with news that the state attorney general is charging three government officials for their alleged roles in the debacle. It makes this a convenient moment to deal with something that has irked me about the way this disaster is framed. ...
As has been reported repeatedly, Flint is a majority black city with a 41 percent poverty rate. So critics ask if the water would have been so blithely poisoned, and if it would have taken media so long to notice, had the victims been mostly white.
It’s a sensible question, but whenever I hear it, I engage in a little thought experiment. I try to imagine what happened in Flint happening in Bowie, a city in Maryland where blacks outnumber whites, but the median household income is more than $100,000 a year, and the poverty rate is about 3 percent. I can’t.
Pitts point is that Flint is about the mistreatment, the dismissal, of people who are poor. Are many of them black? Yep, but the important thing here was that they are poor and more or less powerless to stop the actions of a state government whose stated philosophy is to rate people on their net worth.
The idea that what happened at Flint is racist, isn’t something gen’d up by the “liberal media” in order to make the state seem like racists. It’s an idea created to make poor whites think that the target isn’t painted on their Dollar General T-shirts.
In the Civil War, white men too poor to own slaves died in grotesque numbers to protect the “right” of a few plutocrats to continue that despicable practice. In the Industrial Revolution, white workers agitating for a living wage were kept in line by the threat that their jobs would be given to “Negroes.” In the Depression, white families mired in poverty were mollified by signs reading “Whites Only.”
You have to wonder what would happen if white people — particularly, those of modest means — ever saw that gap for the fiction it is? What if they ever realized you don’t need common color to reach common ground? What if all of us were less reflexive in using race as our prism, just because it’s handy?
If poor white people realized that race was not just being used to divide them from minorities with which they hold great common interest, but also as a sop to allow their own needs to be ignored in the name of directing punishment at those Other People, they might aim their anger and energy where it’s needed. Which is why racism is so, so important to those at the top. This plutocracy runs on racism. Without that hate, the engine would stumble.
Come on in. Let’s pundit.
Frank Bruni on the latest right-wing line in the Ty-D-Bol scented sand.
Out of the potty mouths of billionaires sometimes comes potty sense. This was the case last week with Donald Trump, who weighed in on which bathrooms transgender people should use.
His answer: the ones they want. He assumed, correctly, that this is what many had been doing all along. He noted, accurately, that it hadn’t ushered in the apocalypse.
It’s not the first time when Donald Trump gave a reasonable answer for one reason: he hadn’t taken a moment to think about it. Had he taken a moment to think about it, he’d have come up with the wrong response.
The notion that we should prevent transgender people from using bathrooms that match their gender identity — and that allowing them to do so would imperil children — is a tempest in a toilet, one of the more ludicrous political causes to gain currency in a while. ...
The Cruz campaign released an ad with shadowy footage of bathroom stalls, sinister music and dire warnings, printed in large letters, about how vulnerable “your daughter” and “your wife” would be if Trump’s perspective held sway.
And once again, we saw the choices offered by Trump and Cruz. What Trump is holding out is a twisty branch of chaos. A world build on Heisenberg levels of uncertainty in which to ask The Donald any question means perturbing the balance. What color shall we say the sky is today, oh beloved leader? On the other hand, Cruz offers certainty. Cruz is certain about everything. He’s especially certain that you, I, and that daughter who flinches away from his Bela Lugosi jr. embrace are all going to hell unless he scourges us all back to the very narrow, TrusTed path.
Which is more frightening? Both.
Ruth Marcus also has to go to the potty this morning.
Into the overheated, under-informed bathroom wars comes a well-timed intrusion of sanity in the form of a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit .
The court’s ruling in the case of Virginia high-school junior Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy, was correct — and groundbreaking, with implications beyond the school setting. Yet the decision also creates the legal framework for situations more challenging — and perhaps more unsettling — than what should be the routine matter of letting people use their restroom of choice.
Marcus wanders through scenarios which, to her credit, don’t focus on mythological guys with heavy beards who drape a blonde wig loosely over their scalps, declare that their name is Mandy, and parade into the women’s room. Where they… what are they going to do anyway? Leer at the doors? Aggressively wash their hands? I’ve never been clear on that part.
And then there is Ted Cruz, who sunk, typically, to lowest-common denominator ugliness. “Grown adult men— strangers — should not be alone in a bathroom with little girls,” he said, seizing on Trump’s comments. As if being transgender is equivalent to a propensity to prey on children. Of the same gender.
On the other hand, I’m absolutely clear about the threat of Ted Cruz.
The New York Times talks reparations, and one specific case.
The reparations movement, which calls for compensating the descendants of generations of enslaved Americans going back 250 years, has failed to gain traction in this country for a variety of reasons. …
Bankers, merchants and manufacturers all profited from the slave trade, as did companies that insured slaving ships and their cargo. And more than a dozen universities have acknowledged ties to slavery. Even so, some will find ways to paper over the role that slavery played in their founding and early history.
Most people are quick to grab the “well, that was 150 years ago” get out of reparations free card, as if the effects of slavery haven’t just rippled but rolled through history. In some places, the marks of those waves are easier to see.
Such denials are impossible in the harrowing history of slavery at Georgetown University that Rachel Swarns recounted recently in The Times. In 1838, the Jesuits running the college that became Georgetown sold 272 African-American men, women and children into a hellish life on sugar plantations in the South to finance the college’s continued operation. On that fact, there is no dispute.
The sale by the Jesuits stands out for its sheer size and the directness of its relationship to the existence and fortunes of one of the country’s top Catholic universities.
What should a top university teach about slavery and reparations… when that university’s founding was based, not on some act of charity or notion of a president, but the selling of men, women, and children into hardship and torture?
Georgetown is morally obligated to adopt restorative measures, which should clearly include a scholarship fund for the descendants of those who were sold to save the institution.
Yeah, that seems like a start.
Nicholas Kristof asks a question that has probably been asked ten thousands times this morning about two inches to your right. I don’t men “right” politically. I mean right—right over there, on the rec list.
After the New York primary, the betting websites are giving Hillary Clinton about a 94 percent chance of being the Democratic nominee, and Donald Trump a 66 percent chance of ending up as the Republican nominee.
But Clinton’s big challenge is the trust issue: The share of voters who have negative feelings toward her has soared from 25 percent in early 2013 to 56 percent today, and a reason for that is that they distrust her. Only a bit more than one-third of American voters regard Clinton as “honest and trustworthy.”
Okay. So drumroll, please. What is Kristof’s answer?
One of the perils of journalism is the human brain’s penchant for sorting information into narratives. Even false narratives can take on a life of their own because there is always information arriving that can confirm a narrative.
Thus once we in the news media had declared Gerald Ford a klutz (he was actually a graceful athlete), there were always new television clips of him stumbling. Similarly, we unfairly turned Jimmy Carter into a hapless joke, and I fear that the “Crooked Hillary” narrative will drag on much more than the facts warrant.
Kristof draws parallels between the things that Hillary (and Hillary supporters) label pragmatic and Hillary-scoffers call crooked. It might not be the last word on the subject… in fact, this is an argument that’s not even coming to its middle. But go read Kristof’s piece anyway.
Ross Douthat shakes his silver-tipped cane at the world’s disgusting leftward tilt.
Over the last year, America’s professional intelligentsia has been placed under the microscope in several interesting ways.
When Douthat manages to get “intelligentsia” into his opening sentence, you know he’s in full Bucklarian dudgeon.
First, a group of prominent social psychologists released a paper quantifying and criticizing their field’s overwhelming left-wing tilt. Then Jonathan Haidt, one of the paper’s co-authors, highlighted research showing that the entire American academy has become more left-wing since the 1990s. Then finally a new book by two conservative political scientists, “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University,” offered a portrait of how right-wing academics make their way in a left-wing milieu. (The answer: very carefully, and more carefully than in the past.)
Hang on there. Wait a second while I wring my hanky. You know, the difficulties for a right-wing science professor trying to warn kids about the climate change conspiracy, or a right-wing economics professor who can’t convince his colleagues that Amity Shlaes is right and every historian of the last hundred years is wrong… the obstacles placed in front of someone who wants to tell the trickle-down truth instead of all those damn left-wing facts, it’s just a tragedy.
For its opportunistic fans, neoreaction just offers a pretentious justification for white male chauvinism and Trump worship. But the void that it aspires to fill is real: In American intellectual life there isn’t a far-right answer to tenured radicalism, or a genuinely reactionary style.
Listen, what Douthat is trying to say is that your uncle’s email list full of semi-pornographic Hillary cartoons and embedded Trump tweets is all your fault. Your dominating left-wing culture has just not provided enough outlets for right-wing expression of… well, lets just call it idiocy. But look! They have Douthat’s column. Maybe that will ease the pain.
Kathleen Parker lectures Bernie on Black Lives Matter. This is going to be good. Or wait… that other thing.
African Americans in the South can’t get a break when it comes to voting, as history can’t deny.
After all they’ve endured through slavery, Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, their voices are still treated dismissively by tone-deaf politicians who would ask for their votes.
If you’re thinking Bernie Sanders, you’re partly right.
Please keep in mind that Ms. Parker’s high horse is cobbled together from left over Jeb! / Marco! / Lindsey? campaign posters.
That black voters would prefer a familiar candidate such as Clinton over someone whose personal experience among African Americans seems to have been relatively limited, notwithstanding his participation in civil rights demonstrations, is hardly surprising. For decades, the Clintons have worked for issues and protections important to the African American community.
On the other hand, Parker is (excuse me, this statement is being extracted with at least medium-warm tongs) mostly right in her critcism of those, including Bernie, who equate southern primaries with a distortion of outcome. Wheh. Got it out.
Dana Milbank goes biblical… ish.
Donald Trump picked an inopportune time to try to make people forget his history: concurrent with the Jewish festival of Passover, a holiday about recalling the past.
With a haste suggesting he thinks Americans aren’t all that bright, Trump has been rebranding himself as an inoffensive candidate for the general election. He gave a temperate victory speech in New York on Tuesday and he took more moderate positions this week on gay rights, abortion and the national debt. Trump’s chief strategist, The Post reports, told a group of Republicans privately that Trump had been playing a “part” and is “now evolving.”
What Trump is evolving into is an open question. I kind of think that dragony thing that the mayor was going to become at the end of third season Buffy.
Milbank goes on to list the Trump “plagues,” which honestly look more like the flies category than the passover sort. Milbank is not thinking Trumpy enough. Trump has the best plagues. The greatest plagues.
Peter Wehner is worried about how Trump is straining old relationships in the GOP.
The candidacy of Donald J. Trump is not only fracturing the Republican Party, it is breaking up friendships as well.
A prominent Republican, describing a Trump-related disagreement with another influential Republican with whom he has been close for decades, sent me a note that stated things in a matter-of-fact way: “We had a friendship-ending email exchange.” ...
One close longtime friend told me that my criticism of Mr. Trump stemmed from my desire for attention and notoriety and a longing for the favor of liberals. He was questioning not my reasoning but my motivations. His concern wasn’t about policy; it was about the state of my soul.
Because just pointing out that Trump continually says idiotic things, espouses hatred for breakfast, sexism for lunch, and egoism at every meal… Forget it. If someone is supporting Trump, they know they’re gobbling hate speech.
Kate Taylor on how standardized tests test for something other than knowledge.
When the parents of more than 200,000 pupils in the third through eighth grades in New York chose to have their children sit out standardized state tests last spring, major civil rights organizations were quick to condemn their decision, along with similar movements in Colorado, Washington and New Jersey. ...
Because the families opting out were disproportionately white and middle class, testing proponents dismissed them as coddled suburbanites, while insisting that urban parents, who had graver concerns about the quality of their children’s schools, were supportive of the tests. Earlier this year, proponents of testing began using the hashtag #OptOutSoWhite — a spin on the #OscarsSoWhite social-media campaign — to suggest that testing opposition was a form of white privilege.
A standardized test changed my life. I was stumbling through the first year of high school, collecting my usual raft of Cs salted with Ds, lost in a fugue state of anger, disappointment, and the constant knowledge that I was a loser. Then one of the smart kids mentioned that he’d been invited to come in on a Saturday for an optional test, I went along because… really, I still can’t tell you why. I hadn’t been invited. Didn’t have any expectation that I’d do any better than awful. Three tests later, I was a National Merit Scholar, and on my way to a scholarship, college, and a life that included a lot more options.
Yet as testing season unfolds this year, the debate is becoming murkier. More minority educators, parents and students are criticizing the tests, opening a rift with civil rights groups and black and Hispanic educators who support testing, like Secretary of Education John B. King Jr.
It was also looking at the issue of standardized tests, their clear racial biases, and how they had been used as tools to justify treatment of entire classes of not just kids, but adults, that caused me to write On Whetsday. Racial bias in standardized testing might not seem like the most inspirational subject for a science fiction novel… but it’s what snagged me. Maybe because I’ve seen what a difference a test can make firsthand.